Developed By: Seed By Seed
Published By: Armor Game Studios
Category: Puzzle
Release Date: 02.19.26
Price: $24.99
*Game Download Code graciously provided for the purpose of review
I never played a Tabletop RPG in my life. This includes big titles like Dungeons and Dragons and the thousands of other games. The closest I’ve ever gotten was watching the Dungeons and Dragons movie and playing Knights of Pen and Paper. I never had the time, nor friends, to actually play one. But recently I found a game called Baladins that I had so much fun with.
Baladins is a Choose Your Own Adventure style game that’s disguised as a Tabletop RPG. Plus you have the option of playing by yourself or with up to three friends. The game has everything you could want from this kind of RPG. There’s different character classes, a large world to explore, branching quests, and dice.
The first aspect of the game that spoke to me was the art style and 2D cutout models and environments. The game is basically a mix between board game and pup up book. You move across the world by moving your character across tiles on a board game. When you enter areas or interact with NPC’s, the game shifts to the pop up book style. The game looks so charming, but how does it play?
The gameplay loop takes place over multiple weeks, with each week constituting one turn. Every turn you get a handful of movement and action points to use before you end your turn. Movement points allow you to move across the map, which means you’re limited in how far you can get each turn. Action points let you interact with characters or do tasks that buff your character by increasing stats like Physique.
You’re tasked with helping set up for a festival, so you venture out into the world. While you’re working towards the festival, each area has a bunch of extra side quests that you can do. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to complete everything you want during the limited number of turns that you get. That’s where the games big gameplay loop comes into play. At the end of the final turn, there’s an incident that causes time to rewind back to the start of the game.
Each time you reset, it’s basically a fresh start. Your items and stats are reset, and you start back from week one to do it all over again. But now you can do things that you didn’t get to do in your previous run. Take on those quests that you missed earlier, play with a different character, and take different paths to get where you need to go. Do all this while trying to complete the overall story of the game.
Baladins has a lot of content, and it’s definitely going to appeal to fans of Tabletop RPG’s. It’s a fun game, has a good bit of humor, and looks great. $24.99 is a decent price because you can get anywhere between 10 and 15 hours out of the game if you’re doing everything it has to offer.
8/10